In fact, some of the world's greatest cities are built on land that was once water. Many parts of lower Manhattan were water before the Dutch settled in New Amsterdam, but nobody would suggest giving Battery Park City back to the sea, or turning Boston's Back Bay neighborhood back into an actual bay. Re-flooding Canal Street would be an unfortunate way of dealing with the Chinatown knock-offs, and I'm not sure how many New Yorkers would appreciate the loss of all real estate east of Water Street, which used to follow the edge of the island.

Perhaps the most impressive example of urban land reclamation, though, was the infill of Tokyo Bay. NHK, Japan's public broadcaster, has created an awesome animation showing how Tokyo evolved during the Edo period, from the beginning of the eighteenth century until the end of the Tokugawa shogunate (and beginning of the Meiji Restoration) in 1868. Much of the land was originally reclaimed for agricultural purposes, but has since been heavily urbanized. The blog post I found the image at is, appropriately, titled "Eat your heart out, Dubai!"

In my opinion, opposition to new land reclamation projects by people who revere places like lower Manhattan is pure status quo bias. If cities like New York and Tokyo built amazing places with land reclamation, why should we forsake it today? Old, mummified European city cores in places like Amsterdam and Venice have chosen to retain their historic canals, but growing cities like New York and Hong Kong could not and cannot afford that luxury. Even the Dutch, who left Amsterdam's canals intact, embraced land reclamation right across the water, creating the fast-growing city of Almere.

In dense, dynamic cities like Hong Kong, there seems to be little downside to land reclamation. The amount of environmental destruction involved is minor when you consider how many people will be able to live and work on the land – people who would otherwise be living in more sprawling, environmentally-profligate locales. Although this point seems to have been lost on the city-state's environmentalists, who are against further development projects in Victoria Harbour.

That is, so long as the millionaire condo owners on the waterfront will tolerate the loss of their views. This may actually have been an issue in Hong Kong: unlike reclamation projects in Hong Kong's past, many of the sites currently under consideration are offshore islands.